AEROWORKS is organizing a Special Session on "Towards the realization of the Aerial Robotic Workers" at IROS 2016.

Aim and Scope

Infrastructure is the foundation that connects our resources, energy flows, business, communities and people, driving our economy and improving our quality of life. For the global economies in order to retain and strengthen their competitiveness, a new class of advanced tools and methods is required. This special session focuses on this need and aims to provide aerial robotic infrastructure inspection and maintenance solutions as a next­generation methodology and tool to improve infrastructure services.

More specifically, the aim of this innovative special session is to contribute to the discussions on the state of the art and the future trends towards the concept of “Collaborative Aerial Robotic Workers” that envisions a team of collaborative aerial systems equipped with advanced environmental perception and 3D reconstruction, active aerial manipulation, intelligent task planning, and multi­agent collaboration capabilities. Such a team of Aerial Robotic Workers will be capable of autonomously inspecting infrastructure facilities and acting in order to execute a maintenance task by means of aerial manipulation and exploiting multi­robot collaboration.

The proposal of this special session is aiming in highlighting the early state of the art scientific contributions from the Horizon 2020 AEROWORKS project, which is leading the aerial robotic developments in Europe, while integrating significant contributions from other scientific teams working in the same area and other collaborative projects, while exchanging success stories and enabling an international collaboration under this thematic umbrella.

List of main topics

This special session aims at attracting state of the art articles in order to investigate the underlined emerging scientific challenges of decentralized multi­robot collaboration, path­ planning, control for aerial collaborative manipulation, aerial manipulator design, autonomous localization, as well as, cooperative environmental perception and reconstruction.

Aerial manipulators are a new class of mobile robots characterized by a high degree of mobility and dexterity, due to their capability to fly and perform manipulation operation airborne. However, the intrinsic floating base nature of aerial manipulators give origin to problems that prevent from exploiting the full capabilities of aerial manipulators when deployed in real life applications. Among the major problems, the lack of proper disturbance rejection for the attitude of the aerial manipulator represents the bottleneck for a realistic future deployment of such technology. Unlike fixed base manipulators, when aerial manipulators are subject to external disturbances (interaction force, unpredictable wind gusts), but also when the manipulator simply performs internal motion of its joints, both the attitude and the position control of the aerial manipulator can be destabilized, leading to extreme undesired consequences for the aerial platform. This effect clearly indicates that a classical approach to both the design and the control of the aerial manipulator is not sufficient, in order to fully exploit the capabilities of an aerial manipulator.

This special session aims at attracting state of the art articles on innovative aerial manipulator’s design, from concept to testing and their control in operations involving physical interaction airborne.

The 1st Integration week of AEROWORKS took place in the beginning of December 2015. This was a fruitful week where the developing teams came closer and managed to deliver quite impressive collaborative scientific results. Videos form this event will be posted in the near future.

This workshop addresses Aerial Robotics Manipulation, a growing topic with increasing relevance both scientifically and technologically as the potential impact in applications such as inspection and maintenance, rescue and structure assembly can be great.

Starting from basic results obtained in the last year, this workshop will include the presentation of new simulation results and practical implementations. Thus, new prototypes of Aerial Robotic Manipulators and algorithms will be presented and visualized by means of videos of recent demonstrations. Through the presentation of the most important and latest findings in the field, we aim not only to disseminate this information, but also to trigger discussions about new technologies and current technology limitations and facilitate new collaborations. Moreover, the attendants will be able to experiment with a new Aerial Robotic Simulator that supports Manipulation and will be presented in this workshop.

The organisation of this workshop is focused on core topics presented by invited esteemed speakers experts in their fields. In order to encourage the acquisition of new knowledge and innovative concepts, speakers from other domains sharing some characteristics with Aerial Robotic Manipulation have been also invited.

The AEROWORKS project will be presented at ICRA 2015 Workshop on "Aerial Robotics Manipulation and Load Transportation". This workshop is focused on two relevant functionalities of aerial robots physically interacting with the environment: robotics manipulation and load transportation. These functionalities have many particular applications and cam be also combined in inspection and maintence, search and rescue, environment protection, logistic and many other scenarios. In most cases the physical interaction poses complex control, perception and planning problems.

More information about the workshop can be located in the following link:

AEROWORKS and Dr. Kostas Alexis fromt ETH is going to give a lecture on the summer school on Mobile Manipulators in Spain 2015, where experience and results from AEROWORKS will be also presented. The full details of the talk are the following ones:

Aerial robots can play a major role in infrastructure inspection and maintenance operations. Relying on novel contributions in the fields of flight control, manipulator design and control, perception and path planning, aerial robots will soon be able to execute an autonomous high–fidelity 3D reconstruction task, detect potential risks and hazards and subsequently attempt maintenance work via means of aerial manipulation. This talk will try to cover the fields of inspection path planning for known as well as unknown environments, control for inspection through contact as well as the emerging field of agile manipulation using Micro Aerial Vehicles. Finally, results from the ongoing work of the AEROWORKS Horizon 2020 (http://www.aeroworks2020.eu/) project will be discussed.

AEROWORKS has been presented in the sixth edition of the European Robotics Forum, which brought together at least 600 scientists, companies, and robotics officials. The EU Robotics Forum was there to capture pitches for the latest wave of robotics projects funded by the European Commission under Horizon2020.

The short Interview for AEROWORKS has been provided by Dr. Kostas Alexis and Dr. Margarita Chli in the following video clip.

More news from the EU Robotics forum can be located in the following link:

AEROWORKS is co-organizing at the 2015 European Robotics Forum (ERF) a session on Aerial Manipulation. For a complete description of the session please visit http://www.erf2015.eu/ or download the full description of the session.